05 Agosto 2011, 09:13 h
I hope you enjoyed my first article in the series Exploring Tokyo City. Now let me tell my impressions of the RubyKaigi Conference itself.
What many may not know is that RubyKaigi is in its 6th iteration and it has always been organized by volunteers effort. Their leader is Masayoshi Takahashi-san. He is also the founder of Nihon Ruby-no-kai (Japan Ruby Group) which also helds the e-zine Rubyist Magazine. You should check those resources out to see what the Japanese Rubyists are doing. Great resource.
The main group seems to surround around Takahashi-san and then Shintaro Kakutani-san who works for Eiwa System Management and he is the main Ruby Evangelist in Japan, doing talks all around the country, helping create and organize Regional RubyKaigi, translating books such as the recently released Agile Samurai (from Pragmatic Programmers). As an Evangelist myself, I have to honestly say that Kakutani-san puts me to shame (which inspires me to try harder!). He is doing a remarkable work and if you didn’t know him, you should.
The Program Chair for the conference is no other than Dr. Koichi Sasada, PhD in Information Science and Engineering from The University of Tokyo, he runs the Sasada Labs researching on programming languages and its processors. Oh, and did I mention that he is the creator and current maintainer of “YARV”, the Ruby 1.9 series’ heart? You can read a small interview with him from the Rails Magazine.
There are several individual contributors for RubyKaigi that you really should spend some time knowing about. They are very active and very committed. “Friendship”, “effort”, “unity” and most specially “respect”, were words that came to mind knowing some of them.
